thumb|upright=1.3|[[Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson from atop Rozel Point, Utah, in mid-April 2005]]
thumb|[[Time Landscape by Alan Sonfist, at LaGuardia and Houston Streets in Manhattan, 1965-present]]
Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United States but that also includes examples from many other countries. As a trend, "land art" expanded the boundaries of traditional art making in the materials used and the siting of the works. The materials used are often the materials of the Earth, including the soil, rocks, vegetation, and water found on-site, and the sites are often distant from population centers. Though sometimes fairly inaccessible, photo documentation is commonly brought back to the urban art gallery.
Concerns of the art movement center around rejection of the commercialization of art-making and enthusiasm with an emergent ecological movement. The beginning of the movement coincided with the popularity of the rejection of urban living and its counterpart, and an enthusiasm for that which is rural. Included in these inclinations were spiritual yearnings concerning the planet Earth as home to humanity.
thumb|[[Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt in Utah]]
Form
[[File:Tylicki Natural Art 506.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|Museum paper board left on the bank of the river for 4 days. By
Jacek Tylicki, S.W. of Lund, Sweden, 473 X 354 mm. 1981]]
thumb|The [[Litlington White Horse, an earthwork that utilizes the natural geology of the South Downs as an artistic medium.]]
thumb|upright=1.3|Bunjil, a geoglyph at the [[You Yangs, Lara, Australia, by Andrew Rogers. The creature has a wing span of 100 metres and 1500 tonnes of rock were used to construct it.]]
thumb|upright=1.3|Satellite view of [[Roden Crater, the site of an Earthwork in progress by James Turrell, outside Flagstaff, Arizona]]
thumb|upright=1.3|Meteorite by [[Milton Becerra in Ibirapuera Park, XVIII Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil (1985).]]
thumb|upright=1.3|Side Effect XI, by [[Eberhard Bosslet, Tias, Lanzarote, (2008)]]
thumb|upright=1.3|[[Cretto di Burri|Grande Cretto, by Alberto Burri, Gibellina, (1984-1989)]]
thumb|upright=1.3|[[Star Axis, looking north toward the entrance to the Star Tunnel: By Charles Ross, New Mexico, (1971–in progress)]]
The art form gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s as land art was not something that could easily be turned into a commodity, unlike the "mass produced cultural debris" of the time.
Alan Sonfist used an alternative approach to working with nature and culture by bringing historical nature and sustainable art back into New York City. His most inspirational work is Time Landscape, an indigenous forest he planted in New York City.
It has been noted that 2010's through 2020’s environmental ideals and efforts can go against the intent of some land art to simply exist within the environment, subject to natural forces of entropy, such as Spiral Jetty. This appears to counter-intuitively promote environmental protection via these man made structures. Recent efforts to preserve Land Art bring into question its original purpose and openness to change (including disappearance). “The spiral jetty is surely a quaint monument…But the impulse to rescue and preserve it defines it as fine art like nothing else. Don't be surprised if someone wants to cover it with a plastic bubble-dome…A further irony– with plans for nearby oil-drilling upsetting artists, eco-activists and community people, preserving the unnatural jetty form as an icon of Earth art has become a wedge against extracting this natural earth product from the ground.”
Other modern exhibitions, such as the Fly Ranch exhibition in 2021, focus on how their art affects their surroundings with modern environmental ideals in mind. This exhibition focused on making art pieces that also functioned as animal shelters, solar farms that don't take up huge spaces, planters, and water cleaners. This was accomplished by critically thinking about how they would implement their pieces, and by extension, the green energy they would use or represent.
In 1967, the art critic Grace Glueck writing in The New York Times declared the first Earthwork to be done by Douglas Leichter and Richard Saba at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The sudden appearance of land art in 1968 can be located as a response by a generation of artists mostly in their late twenties to the heightened political activism of the year and the emerging environmental and women's liberation movements.
One example of land art in the 20th century was a group exhibition called "Earthworks" created in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February 1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the "Earth Art" exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The artists included were Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Gunther Uecker. The exhibition was directed by Thomas W. Leavitt. Gordon Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition.
Perhaps the best known artist who worked in this genre was Robert Smithson whose 1968 essay "The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" provided a critical framework for the movement as a reaction to the disengagement of Modernism from social issues as represented by the critic Clement Greenberg. His best known piece, and probably the most famous piece of all land art, is the Spiral Jetty (1970), for which Smithson arranged rock, earth and algae so as to form a long (1500 ft) spiral-shape jetty protruding into Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, U.S. How much of the work, if any, is visible is dependent on the fluctuating water levels. Since its creation, the work has been completely covered, and then uncovered again, by water. A steward of the artwork in conjunction with the Dia Foundation, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts regularly curates programming around the Spiral Jetty, including a "Family Backpacks" program.
Smithson's Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust (1968) is an example of land art existing in a gallery space rather than in the natural environment. It consists of a pile of gravel by the side of a partially mirrored gallery wall. In its simplicity of form and concentration on the materials themselves, this and other pieces of land art have an affinity with minimalism. There is also a relationship to Arte Povera in the use of materials traditionally considered "unartistic" or "worthless". The Italian Germano Celant, founder of Arte Povera, was one of the first curators to promote land art.
"Land artists" have tended to be American, Peter Hutchinson, Ana Mendieta, Dennis Oppenheim, Andrew Rogers, Charles Ross, Alan Sonfist, and James Turrell. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art thus far, reshaping the earth surrounding the extinct Roden Crater volcano in Arizona. The most prominent non-American land artists are the British Chris Drury, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long and the Australian Andrew Rogers. Western United States was a significant location for land artists, as the open frontiers and deserts offered by the country were seen as canvas' or testing beds for land artists.
In 1973 Jacek Tylicki begins to lay out blank canvases or paper sheets in the natural environment for the nature to create art. Some projects by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in fabric, have also been considered land art by some, though the artists themselves considered this incorrect. Joseph Beuys's concept of "social sculpture" influenced "land art", and his *7000 Eichen* project of 1982 to plant 7,000 Oak trees has many similarities to land art processes. Rogers' “Rhythms of Life” project is the largest contemporary land-art undertaking in the world, forming a chain of stone sculptures, or geoglyphs, around the globe – 12 sites – in disparate exotic locations (from below sea level and up to altitudes of 4,300 m/14,107 ft). Up to three geoglyphs (ranging in size up to 40,000 sq m/430,560 sq ft) are located in each site.
Land artists in America relied mostly on wealthy patrons and private foundations to fund costly projects or were commissioned by these patrons and foundations to create artwork; Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) was commissioned by The Dia Art Foundation. With the sudden economic downturn of the mid-1970s and land art not being inherently marketable in the commercial art market, Michael Heizer in 2022 completed his work on City, and James Turrell continues to work on the Roden Crater project. In most respects, "land art" has become part of mainstream public art and at times the term "land art" is misused to label any kind of art in nature. Even if conceptually not related to the avant-garde works by the pioneers of land art.
The Earth art of the 1960s were sometimes reminiscent of much older land works, such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Native American mounds, the Nazca Lines in Peru, Carnac stones, and Native American burial grounds, and often evoked the spirituality of such archeological sites.